The United States and Japan will step up their defence cooperation to deal with the threat from nuclear-armed North Korea as tensions in East Asia remain high, officials from the two allies said on Thursday.

1983 nuclear peril and no-one noticed

The USA and USSR came terrifyingly close to nuclear war in late 1983 and the first Australia would have known of it was when mushroom clouds rose over US bases at Pine Gap, Nurrungar and North West Cape.

In a new study, Australian National University Professor Paul Dibb, a defence intelligence official in the 1970s and 1980s, said at this time the world stood on the edge of the nuclear abyss and the US didn't even realise it.

The crisis peaked in the period November 7-11 as the Soviets interpreted a routine NATO command post exercise called Able Archer as a cover for preparations for war.

Professor Dibb said it was conventional wisdom that there was only one occasion in the Cold War when there was serious risk of nuclear conflict, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

But then, unlike what occurred in 1983, both sides knew they were in a crisis and had broadly the same facts at their disposal.

"Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe and with prompt nuclear strike capabilities on both the US and Soviet sides orders of magnitude greater than in 1962," he said in the paper released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Had that occurred, the first Australia would have known was with nuclear strikes on US facilities at Pine Gap, outside Alice Springs, Nurrungar in South Australia and North West Cape in Western Australia.

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"We know that this was likely because western spies for the Soviet Union in the late 1970s had given Moscow some insights into the significance of these intelligence and communications facilities for what it saw as US nuclear warfighting strategy," he said.

1983 was a year of rising tensions, with then US president Ronald Reagan first declaring the USSR as the "evil empire" then, two weeks later launching the Star Wars missile defence program.

The USSR saw this as highly provocative, with then leader Yuri Andropov accusing Reagan of inventing new plans to unleash nuclear war.

On September 1, 1983 tensions ratcheted further when a Soviet fighter shot down a straying Korean Airlines Jumbo Jet over its territory, killing all 269 on board. The US portrayed this as an act of callous brutality by a barbaric regime.

Professor Dibb said Andropov - according to report from defector Oleg Gordievsky - had a fixation on the possibility the tha US was planning a first strike against the USSR.

He directed the KGB to collect any intelligence which might indicate mobilisation for war, which could occur under the cover of apparently routine military exercises.

That duly emerged as NATO conducted its annual Autumn Forge exercise, culminating in Able Archer. Alarmist KGB reports convinced the Soviet leadership this might be a countdown to nuclear war.

Soviet reactions included placing aircraft in East Germany on higher alert and arming them with nuclear weapons.

As it turned out, nothing happened. Central Intelligence Agency director Robert Gates later acknowledged the CIA didn't really grasp the extent of Soviet alarm until much later.

Professor Dibb said the big lesson to be learned was how the US with vast intelligence resources directed at the USSR could get it so badly wrong.

Those lessons could be applied to US competition with China, with the risk of nuclear escalation, either by accident or design.

"It's worrisome in this context that there are no nuclear arms control agreements, military confidence building measures or the practising of emergency communications procedures between Washington and Beijing," he said.